One way to get an idea (an extremely rough idea) of what kind of proportion of modern music might be remembered 100 years in the future occurred to me.

Look at some of the on-line collections of sheet music. The ones that *I* have used most include:

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University

Inventions of Note: Sheet Music Collection, Lewis Music Library, MIT

The Digital Sheet Music Collection at University Libraries, University of Colorado at Boulder

There are MANY others!

Look through the music in one of these and count the number of songs that you are familiar with compared with the number of songs you look at. I recall looking through the Levy Collection some time ago: the Collection returned about 500 results from the search that I had made; I had only ever heard or heard of ONE of the lyrics. (Interestingly enough, several dozen of the tunes were familiar ... with different lyrics.)

I suggest that doing this kind of count over a reasonably large selection of music from 100 years ago would give you a decent guess at the proportion of today's music that will survive 100 years.

Given that there are more of us today, I would assume that there are more songs coming out today. I would guess, however, that the proportions should be similar.

*shrug*

It's a thought.

BB,
NightWing